YIN AND YANG

The art department at my university was going to have a new design teacher, and the 3^rd-year girls I was studying art with were all thrilled to bits. He was single, they had heard, and fresh out of graduate school – as young as a teacher could possibly be.

There was a great deal of speculation about what he would be like. Kimiko wondered if he would be hip; design teachers were supposed to be hip, so she rather thought he would be. Kazue pictured a dreamy, philosophical type with soulful eyes and strong, clever hands. Michiyo claimed that she didn’t care what he looked like as long as he was an easy grader.  All the other teachers, most of them old men of forty or older, were notorious for being hard taskmasters who really made you work for good grades.

The girls’ hopes were somewhat dashed a few weeks later when they heard that the new design teacher would be getting married just before he signed his teaching contract. Alas, he would not be potential husband material. But still, they could dream, couldn’t they?  Even a married man would be more exciting than the boring old fogies the girls had been taught by for the past two and a half years.

When Yanagi-san finally came, though, we were all hugely disappointed. He was a short, slight man, pencil thin, with a narrow, ferrety little face and practically no facial hair. His voice was thin and reedy too and he had an affected, high-pitched whinny of a laugh that made even my skin crawl. His complexion was unnaturally white, and his forearms and hands were so delicate and skinny, you found yourself wondering whether he could handle a pen knife or paper cutter without injuring himself.

Kazue expressed amazement that there was any woman in all of Japan willing to marry such a man.  We all wondered what his wife was like. I pictured a tiny, hyper-feminine creature who would make him look if not tall, at least normal-sized.

Some of us eventually had the chance to meet her when the sculpture teacher threw a barbeque at his house for the art department faculty and a handful of his favorite students. Coming into the house, I was startled by the sound of a woman’s laughter. It was wild, gutsy and coarse – not the sort of laughter you usually hear in broad daylight in Japan when everyone tends to be stone-cold sober. ‘That’s Yanagi-san’s wife,’ murmured Matsue, the wife of the painting teacher. ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you to her.’

Sitting next to her husband, Mrs Yanagi looked even bigger than she really was. And by Japanese standards, she was massive. At just under 5’7” I was the tallest woman on campus – probably in the entire town. But Mrs Yanagi was a close second.  She must have weighed a stone more than I did, too. Her regular speaking voice made you think of a ship's captain – a ship's captain of good, honest peasant stock, that is. She had a ruddy, pock-marked face and a completely uncontrived manner. You got the feeling that when she wanted to let out a good belly laugh, she just let it out, that she wasn’t the type who would discreetly pass her tongue over her teeth to feel for stray bits of spinach first. Even now, many Japanese women still cover their mouths with their hands when they laugh, but I’m willing to bet that the idea had never occurred to Mrs Yanagi.

The other faculty wives looked stunned. Throughout the party, Mrs Yanagi frequently interrupted and corrected her husband in a friendly, high-spirited manner. She wasn’t unkind or crude. She didn’t smoke or make catty comments, and she showed interest in what other people at the table were saying even if she did hog some of the conversation. But she was completely not their type.

Later that day, Matsue, the painting teacher’s wife, asked me what I thought of Mrs Yanagi. I grinned broadly and said that she was not what I had expected. Matsue allowed that she was not what anyone had expected, but that she and her new husband seemed perfectly happy. ‘Definitely an arranged marriage,’ she said, and I had to agree.

Five years later, Matsue and her husband, who had not had an arranged marriage but a ‘love match,’ went through a particularly unpleasant divorce. The last I heard, Mr and Mrs Yanagi had three children and were still going strong.